Everyone’s in danger in Caprice Hokstad’s 2nd volume of The Ascendancy Trilogy. kee, Captain Shil, and healer Pharn Patkus have a new plan to locate Dauntere, the duke’s missing son, in enemy territory. Meanwhile, Countess Delorae has plans to become the new mistress of Rebono Keep, whether Duke Vahn wants her or not.

Nor Iron Bars a Cage is the perfect sequel to The Duke’s Handmaid. We get to know and love the characters even more, including the arrogant Duke Vahn, who finally gets a taste of his own medicine…and more.

I was also surprised and pleased to see a couple of more Christian overtones coming into play in book 2. They are very subtle, but one character’s actions for another can only remind us of Christ’s sacrifice for us, and the mages begin to reveal a different side of Latoph’s religion.

If you haven’t read The Duke’s Handmaid yet, do yourself a favor and read it as fast as you can, and then pick up Nor Iron Bars a Cage. Book 3, Blood and Brine, comes out shortly.

An alien ship has crash-landed on Earth, setting off a new wave of drug addiction and world war in its wake, while the sole survivor of the wreckage vows revenge against the god-like authorities of his home planet. At the same time, the new president of the GenRes Company is obsessed with living up to his father’s medical success and has just discovered how to transform normal children into Genetically Altered super-humans. Who will control these children? The scientist, the alien, and a couple of ambitious criminals are all eager to keep them for their own use. But Someone else has entirely different plans for them. Follow as each development merges together and a new breed of adolescent superheroes rises to the forefront in book one of The Gifted: In the Beginning.

1 comment:

Thanks so much for the review, Steve. I should tell folks that the cover you show here is from my self-published version and is probably pretty hard to find unless you want a hardback. Splashdown Books redid the cover so that all three books in the trilogy are very similar in look. Looking forward to your thoughts on the third and final book.